If we’re talking high-profile, big name cultural figures — and not child molesters, serial killers and your occasional Wall Street banker — Rush Limbaugh would make the top five Most Contemptible People of This Generation.
So tt was of course fitting that Donald Trump, in tight competion with Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and maybe Dick Fuld (ex-CEO of Lehman Brothers) for Numero Uno, would pause his “State of My Mind” speech Tuesday night to award Limbaugh the (instantly much-diminished) Presidential Medal of Freedom … to the sycophantic roars of Trump (and Limbaugh’s) assembled Republican hostages.
I’m fond of boring people with the conservative lineage that gave us Donald Trump. She was a huge asset, but no, it didn’t begin with a raving twit like Sarah Palin being elevated to the public stage. And it wasn’t George W., Charlie McCarthy to Dick Cheney’s Edgar Bergen. It wasn’t even FoxNews … not there at the beginning, anyway. It was Limbaugh.
It was Limbaugh, unleashed by Ronnie Reagan’s sign-off on a last ditch attempt to codify The Fairness Doctrine into law who kicked open the sluice gates from the manure pond of rancid personal attack, gross distortion of facts and reality, incivility and … and! … the billions to be made by agitating the self-pitying greivances of America’s white males. (The Fairness Doctrine stood for 40 years as a way to give people and agencies attacked on public airwaves an opportunity to respond.)
Limbaugh’s act metastasized practically overnight and within three years was the most dominant show in the country, fattening not just his bank account but that of thousands of otherwise beknighted radio managers and salesmen all across the country. These were people who all of a sudden found themselves in the business of charging top rates from a nearly inexhaustible list of clients eager to “be where the men are.”
There was no secret to Limbaugh’s “secret sauce”. It was a constant mocking antipathy of minorities, feminists, the established news media, environmentalists, unions and on and on, but mostly liberals. Bill Clinton, few people’s idea today of a hair on fire “lib”, was a godsend to Limbaugh. He couldn’t find enough foul and invariably false things — i.e. brazen lies — to accuse him of. (The stamp Limbaugh alone put on “Crooked Hillary” did as much to sully her in the average voter’s mind than any other single perason else … so say I.)
On a personal level, Limbaugh, currently on wife #4, was also a trailblazer for a candidate with essentially no moral bona fides to get up and bellow that contrary to what your lying eyes were telling you he was imbued with the light and spirit of the one true God! And not only bellow it, but … be believed … by the huge audience of white Americans desperate to hold on their presumption of status without, you know, doing too much readin’ and thinkin’ to find out for themselves what was really … truly … true.
More sinister in the pantheon of Nefarious Schemes is that what Limbaugh introduced as a winning populist concept is precisely — and I do mean precisely — what Vladimir Putin, then rising through the wholly corrupt post-Soviet bureaucracy — seized on as his primary tactic for diminishing western democracies, the United States in particular.
The tactic was, given that Putin had no money for big flashy weapons systems … bullshit.
To be clear, a constant torrent of bullshit and lies and threats so thick and dense and ceaseless the average person soon gave up even trying to figure out what was true. Whatever “truth” was reported by someone once thought credible was countered three times over with, to paraphrase Kellyanne Conway, an “alternative truth.” It’s what put Putin in power in Russia and what keeps him there today. (It sure isn’t the economy or life expectancy.)
Hell, Trump advisor Steve Bannon came right out and said it two years ago.
“The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Trump is merely the poisoned flower of all that toxic fertilizer. With Limbaugh as the stem and America’s vast, complacent/lazy/anxious sub-set of race and gender-phobic men is the root system. All and all, it’s about as ignoble, graceless and, as I say, contemptible as it gets.
But it sells. As they say in the ad trade, “You can move product with that message.”
As nauseating as it was to see Melania T. wrap Limbaugh with a medal previously given to the likes of Mother Teresa, Stephen Hawking, Jackie Robinson, Buckminster Fuller, Georgia O’Keefe, T.S. Eliot and Elie Weisel, we’ve reached the point where nothing actually surprises us anymore. Disgust, yes. Surprise, no. There is simply no corruption or vulgarity the ethos of Limbaugh-FoxNews-Trump (and all their sycophants and wannabes) won’t visit on our most respected traditions.
Which leads me to wonder. Given the bona fides of his career and the naked prejudice and disinformation he’s pumped into the American system for over 30 years, what will the mainstream obit writers say when Limbaugh, now with “advanced” lung cancer, finally departs this earth?